


Done saying I'm done playing

by disenchanted



Series: This happy breed of men [3]
Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Class Issues, Drinking, Enemies With Benefits, London, M/M, Unsafe Sex, fathers and sons, non-negotiated s/m dynamics, unintentional Hollinghurst pastiche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 06:49:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6363721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry does a favor for Hal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Done saying I'm done playing

**Author's Note:**

> This is a more or less direct sequel to [Probably going to sin again](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5976931), which is an indirect sequel to [A Precedent](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5669833). It might help to read the former for context, but it isn't strictly necessary.
> 
> Thanks to Lilliburlero for betaing and providing much-needed insight into Scots-English relations; any remaining weirdness is my own.

The worst thing about fucking Hal Lancaster, thought Harry, standing dolefully in the greengrocery section of Waitrose, was that he couldn’t look at an entirely morally inculpable Small Caribbean Fairtrade Banana without thinking of Hal’s cock. Both were more or less the same size, yes, and had the same sort of upwards motion; but that didn’t explain why he should be beholden to the association, why he should be unable to simply select a bag of bananas and put it in his basket, even as a harried-looking woman shoved her trolley through the narrow aisle with a curt ‘ _Excuse_ me.’ Were bananas even so nutritious as all that, he wondered? _Must_ one buy a bag of Small Caribbean Fairtrade Bananas, or even the ordinary-sized St. Lucia ones? Could he be certain that the bag didn’t contain a banana spider that would inject him with a deadly neurotoxin? Or did he perhaps _want_ to find the bag with the banana spider in? He thought a passable assassination could be effected: all it would take was a quick shake of the bag in Hal’s direction, which wasn’t nearly as much effort as Harry generally expended on trying to kill the people he hated. 

He did not buy bananas. He did, impulsively, ask the girl at the checkout to give him a packet of Marlboros, the red kind, and a lighter, the addition of which was so obviously the sign of a just-lapsed former smoker that he blushed. The humiliation was not enough to dampen the dizzy relief he felt while standing within the grey brutalist waste of the shopping centre, taking the first desperate drag off the first cigarette in the packet. 

 

* * *

 

The doorbell rang, shaking the flat down with noise, just as Harry was considering cracking open a window and having another cigarette. Frankly he was almost thankful for the distraction; he was only almost thankful because he knew who was doing the ringing. As soon as the door was half-open Hal was in the living room, kicking off his loafers and saying, ‘I was just up in fucking Edgware with Poins, so I thought I might as well come see you; makes the drive back to Dad’s less intolerable.’ 

‘What, you can’t go an hour without getting a blowjob? Look,’ said Harry, ‘I can’t do this right now, I’m doing w-work.’

In fact he _was_ doing work; he was three sentences into a piece for a travel magazine about the remnants of empire in India (he had stalled after his observation that it was funny how much they seemed to like P.G. Wodehouse there). No small part of his motivation came from the fact that he would be able to say he had published something, whereas Hal hadn’t written anything but text messages since his last exams.

‘Work,’ scoffed Hal. ‘“Oh no, can’t tonight, I’ve got to stay late at the office; sorry dear, I wish I was a massive toff and could do what I liked….” Anyway I was going to offer to blow _you_.’

‘You can’t do that either. What do you want?’ 

‘I’ll tell you after I finish,’ said Hal, and nodded towards the long grey sofa beneath the picture window. When Harry showed no signs of responding, Hal took Harry by the collar of his t-shirt and pushed him back onto the sofa forcibly, exerting a strength that was honestly shocking in view of his lankiness. Harry hit the leather with a winded ‘Ugh!’

Kneeling, unbuttoning Harry’s flies, Hal added, ‘You can come on my face if you like.’ The tone of his voice indicated that this was not an enticement but a concession granted only after Harry’s implicit acceptance of his terms. All the same it put Harry well on his way to achieving a remarkable erection.

One of the more tolerable things about fucking Hal, thought Harry as Hal set to the task, was that in a physical sense he seemed to allow anything. He allowed it when Harry put his hands in his hair and wrapped his curls around his fingers; he allowed it when Harry pulled; he allowed it when Harry, as an experiment more than anything, cupped the back of his head and pushed it down onto his cock. It was as if Hal thought it would be an inconvenience to in any way resist. Harry found this sexy in the moment, but if he thought about it for too long he began to feel as though Hal was in some indefinable way getting one over on him.

‘Stop,’ said Harry, and Hal, clutching Harry’s thighs still, stopped. ‘Shove back a bit. No, stay on your knees. Like, that’s fine.’ 

Harry stood. With Harry upright and Hal kneeling before him, it was possible for Harry to fuck Hal’s face. He did; though he would have liked to throw his head back, he kept Hal in his sight, and watched how Hal’s light eyes watered. Now and then Harry’s cock hit his throat at the wrong angle and he gagged, a sudden horrible sound that made Harry feel as though his guts had been shocked by a live wire.

‘Oh my god,’ said Harry. ‘Oh god, stop for a sec, I’m going to come right now.’

‘Okay,’ croaked Hal.

Gamely Hal sat back on his heels and, with his face tilted up and his mouth open, began tossing Harry off. Hal had stroked him four or five times before Harry was letting off his spunk onto his cheek and nose, then shaking the last droplets out onto his lips. As Harry softened Hal gave him a last few slobbery up-and-downs; then it was over and Harry was standing in the middle of his living room with his trousers pulled down his thighs, and Hal was kneeling in front of him with come on his sweaty red face. 

‘ _Anyway_ ,’ said Hal, rising, groaning a little at the change of position, ‘my father wants your father to get his Scottish friends to launch another Project Fear and spread it south of the border before an EU referendum’s on the table. So work on that, or whatever.’

‘Your father can fucking well tell my father that himself,’ said Harry. He found himself shouting towards the kitchenette; Hal had gone to the sink to wash his face.

Patting his damp face with one of Harry’s tea towels, Hal said, ‘He can’t, though. He’s having one of his paranoid turns; he thinks if your father knows it’s him asking, your father will do the opposite just to spite him. I mean he’s raving about migrants making an independent nation-state of Kent.’

‘You ought to take him on holiday to Syria and leave him there, see how he feels about the North Downs then.’

‘Oh, fine,’ said Hal, idly sizing up Harry’s spice rack, ‘but I don’t see you giving up Warkworth.’

‘ _Couldn’t_ , you unmitigated arsehole; it belongs to the National Trust.’

‘Don’t you think living in London and letting the Collinses from Sheffield pay twenty quid to take in the Downton Abbey exhibit and have a slice of cake at the café is reinforcing the status quo really? You could always start a fire.’

‘First you rub come all over my tea towel—’

‘Your come, your tea towel,’ said Hal, and tossed the towel in the general direction of the counter; it landed on the fruit bowl, necessitating that Harry shove his way into the kitchenette to rescue his mandarins.

‘You were the o-one,’ said Harry, throwing the towel into the sink with a touch more force than the action merited, ‘who insisted I come on your face in the first place.’

‘Yes, but you wanted it in the first place. Look, Percy, I’m dying for a fag, and I’ve got some dance thing of Phillippa’s anyway, so I’ll get out of your hair and let you trudge back to the salt mines. You’re welcome for the orgasm; you know it actually feels really good to know I’ve punctuated your miserable life with a sole scintillating moment of sexual satisfaction.’

Once Hal was gone, down the stairs and out of the building, Harry leant back against the refrigerator, let its buzzing give him a sort of ineffectual back massage, and realised how too-familiar his flat felt after Hal had been in it. The atmosphere of possession, of uninterrupted individuality, was punctured rather by the sensation that Hal was just around the corner, smoking out of the bedroom window or rifling through the bookshelves or doing something mysterious in the loo. When Harry considered his article he imagined Hal sitting behind his shoulder as he typed, laughing at things Harry hadn’t known were funny. 

 

* * *

 

‘It’s a good thing you’ve rung me,’ said Harry’s father, ‘I’d been meaning to remind you your friend Prince Max will be in London next week. It might be nice of you to take him to that club you all like…Masala?’

‘Mahiki, Dad,’ said Harry irritably. He was lying upside-down on the sofa so that his head hung off the edge of the seat and collected blood. ‘But no one goes there anymore, and Max looks like a frog, and he’s like, nineteen, and he’ll want me to score him cocaine.’ He wondered how his father would respond if he told him he had been literally thrown out of the club last summer; it was always a tossup whether his father would find something laddishly hilarious or worthy of a conventional haranguing. Probably he would have to wait another year at least to tell the Mahiki story safely. ‘I was actually wo-wondering if I couldn’t come up to see you in Scotland for a couple of days.’

‘Are you bored of London? Speaking of cocaine, I don’t think anyone in my day would have survived socially without amphetamines….’

‘God, I’ve been in the country half the time, Wi-Wiltshire or whatever, and I’m still three seconds away from throwing myself out of the window like Septimus Smith. Everyone w-w-worthwhile’s abroad, Ed Mortimer’s with his girlfriend in wuh-wuh-wuh—Caernarfon, they’ve all abandoned me here to rot with the Lancasters. I’m deadly serious, I’ll take the Caledonian. Um, also, Dad, I’ve got a question for you: how do you know if you’re being, like, blackmailed?’

 

* * *

 

Slowly Harry began slipping down the back of the armchair in which he was seated, sinking further and further into its plush until his chin was pressed up against his chest and his arse was halfway off the seat. He had had a bottle of wine at dinner, and that was after cocktails and before sherry; and in the smoking room the fire was lit, and his father had Kind of Blue on the record player, which Harry supposed was a masterpiece but which had never not sent him off to sleep. When his phone pinged in his pocket he nearly didn’t look at it, except that his father, still tapping his toes along with the drums, said, ‘Who is it who’s talking to you?’

Harry glanced at the screen to see that @lancasterhal had liked the photo he’d posted on Instagram earlier in the day. In the photo he was on the moors, sprawled behind a heather-strewn shooting butt, a contented setter at his side and six very dead red grouse lined up in front of him. Another notification appeared: Hal had commented, ‘Quick shot eh ’.

‘Margaret whingeing about school,’ said Harry. In fact his sister so much enjoyed school, or anyway the girls’ rugby team, that she had forgotten to speak to him since she went down in late August.

‘Oh, well,’ said his father, ‘let her wriggle a bit; it’s the beginning of term. Tell her about the shooting she’s missing, that’ll have her frothing.’

Upstairs in one of the guest bedrooms, which contained as much Border tartan and ingenious antler furniture as could be expected of a Percy hunting lodge, Harry nestled half-naked into a lambswool blanket, also Border drab, and dared another look at his phone. Since he’d last looked, @tom_percy had commented on the photo with a tremendously damning ‘@lancasterhal @hpercypercy haha’. Harry sometimes forgot that whatever he posted would pass under the nose of all four of his siblings and his innumerable cousins. Clearly Hal did not.

_They aren’t going to think I’ve done anything really bad_ , Harry texted Hal. 

_They think I’m being sexually harrassed by you because you’re jealous_

_Which is true_

_I honestly don’t care_ , Hal replied.

_Okay haha_

_Are you going to wait until the night before you leave to mention the thing I asked you about_

_Dad had dinner with BoJo the other night lol_

_Didn’t tell me what they said though_

_It’s like he doesn’t trust me? No clue why_

_Surprised you care about all that and not anything else_

_I didn’t think you would give a fuck about the massive geopolitical ramifications of a Brexit so long as your Wetherspoons doesn’t shut down_

_Don’t you think that is low-hanging fruit_

_I’m going to bed. Zzzzzzzzzz_

_Not at midnight you aren’t_

But if Hal had not gone to bed, he had gone somewhere. For half an hour Harry waited, vigilant and eager, his phone lying face-up on the bedspread next to him; notionally he was reading a book on Dutch-Surinamese relations in the 18th century, but doubted he would have been able to produce any information on the topic if questioned. The longer he went without a message the less patience he could devote to the task, so that at last he flopped back, covered his face with the open book and groaned into the scent of slightly musty paper. He knew he had given up on receiving a response when, with the book still on his face, he began pitifully to wank.

 

* * *

 

London: what idiot said that if you were bored with it, you were bored with life? What sane man wouldn’t be bored with another themed nightclub off Sloane Square? This one, which had been open about a month, had been done up with fake trees and waterfall fountains to resemble a rainforest, but Harry had _been_ to the Amazon and had not been blinded by thousand-watt blue lights. Also he had spent most of his time with a swarthy Brazilian man whose ambition was to become a kind of John Wayne; he and his collection of belt buckles were, Harry decided, much better company than the froggy-faced Scandinavian teenager sitting across the table. Prince Max, texting three or four people at once, paused only to lean over the table and ask, ‘Do you know any, you know, girls, here?’ 

‘What do you mean, “you know, girls”? Does that mean you’re asking me whether I know any who will have sex with you for money?’

‘What? No, just, you know, ones who want to have a fun time. I want to get to know some English girls. Maybe I’ll marry into the royal family.’

So Harry went out to have a smoke in the cordoned-off rectangle in front of the club. With his fag between his lips he phoned Ed Mortimer’s girlfriend and said, before she had a chance to greet him properly, ‘Hi, Catrin, back from Wa-wa-wales yet? How d’you and your friends fancy a night at Bananas with some Nordic cunt? … Well, yeah, neither do I, but I’ve fucking got to. … Hey, know any royal-chasers? Like, ones who would settle for the son of the son of the king of a country whose national specialty is pickled fish? … Great, thanks, see you here, and bring a rope so I can hang myself.’

When Harry returned to his table Prince Max was sitting disconsolately in front of his aguaje cocktail, twirling the plastic toucan that speared the chunk of fruit in the bottom of the glass. Harry was only halfway in his chair when Max said, ‘Give me your dealer’s number.’

‘I don’t have a dealer,’ said Harry. ‘Do you have any idea how many people _die_ for your little baggies of baking soda and cow dewormer? I mean, if you wa-want to be seen spending money there’s always the drink with the rum bottled in the stone age and the ice hand-chipped from the peak of Mount Everest.’

‘Why are you so fucking boring, when you haven’t got to be?’

‘Because I wa-want to _live_ ,’ cried Harry, throwing up his hands like a saint. He couldn’t quite muster the fat obvious tears of the weeping Madonna. ‘To say “yes” to life, to be more than myself! To be o-one with the spirit that rolls through all things!’

Blandly Max said, ‘I am pretty sure you are living. Anyway, I’ve texted my mate who’s at a club down the street. He says he knows where to score, so I told him to come by; you don’t mind?’

Harry would have minded if the mate had proved the sort of rubber-faced Euro-Sloane he’d expected. ‘Minded’, however, wasn’t the word to describe what he felt when the mate turned up; Harry thought ‘apoplectic,’ but he must have looked dead as a duck in duck season. Because of course he’d known all the while what it had meant to come back. There was beauty to be found in every place on God’s own earth but London; in London there was Hal; and there Harry was in London, and there was Hal, ruddy and with a triangle of sweat soaking through the front of his white shirt.

‘Oh, wow, Harry,’ said Hal, ‘I had no idea you were here. I thought you were like, in Prague?’

‘You knew I was here,’ said Harry. Emboldened by the appearance of Catrin and her friends, who were not nearly drunk enough to suffer Hal gladly, he jabbed a finger into Hal’s sweat-triangle. ‘You knew fucking we-well I was here. You didn’t come to see this wanker.’ 

Without stepping back, Hal said, ‘If you want to go out, we can fight in the street. Don’t be too hard on me, though; I don’t work out like you do.’ 

‘Do you? Do you want to fight?’

‘Not that much, actually. Is it that odd that I’d want to come along and teach the next generation how to take drugs at clubs? I mean, it’s bloody difficult for them, the new clubs put in toilets without seats….’

‘Oh, fuck off, you hate these places as much as I do.’

‘No, I dont; I don’t hate anything as much as you hate things. I practise tolerance.’ Having said that Hal spun away insouciantly, nodding hello to Catrin, making a gesture towards the bar to the effect that he might as well stand his round. 

His round was a tray of shots, one of rum and one of cachaca for each of them, including the Welsh girls: they were not too proud, or maybe just drunk enough, to drink what they were offered, though Catrin did so with the middle finger of her cupholding hand extended in Hal’s direction. But Harry was principled; he had the self-denial of a monk, except that he wasn’t so ascetic, but that was only because, save for a couple of spiritual retreats, he had never tried to be; he was sure that if he _wanted_ to give up drinking or fucking or Nando’s, he could. It was with all the force of that resoluteness that he put up his hand and told Hal, ‘No, fuck you, I’m not doing shots with you again.’

‘Yes, you are,’ said Hal.

‘Oh, fuck yourself,’ said Harry.

The effect of this was that Hal and Max, who _did_ work out like Harry did, held Harry down and poured the shots into his mouth. Harry tried to spit, but swallowed instinctively (he wondered why he could swallow now, when he couldn’t do it during a blowjob). As soon as they let him up he went in for fisticuffs. That ended more or less the same way as the night at Mahikis: a large bald man in a black jumper seized him by the shirt and carried him to the door like a cat carrying a kitten by the scruff. Before he was set upon by the bouncer, however, Harry had gotten in one glorious crack to Hal’s eye; it was that which consoled him when the pavement scraped his hands and knees. 

 

* * *

 

Sometime after the sun had risen there was a tremendous noise. Harry fumbled in his duvet to find the source of it; alighting on his phone, he squinted at the screen and was confronted with some sort of alien language which he was not nearly awake enough to begin to understand. _slid e to awnes r ?_ Was he meant to press the button? Which button was he meant to press? He did something that made the noise stop and settled his sore face into his pillow. 

Then (time must have passed) there was another noise, which after a moment Harry identified as the doorbell ringing. It couldn’t be done away with as easily as the phone; Harry waited for a while to see if it would stop and was jolted awake every two or three seconds by a renewed round of ringing. Whoever was at the door was pressing the button as desperately—as desperately, thought Harry, as a fresher who had read a lot of online sex advice and had just got the opportunity to test his skill in the manipulation of the clitoris. This observation was amusing to him until he remembered that he had been that fresher and that the girl had had to stop him by saying, ‘No, seriously, it’s not working, it’s better if you just let me do it’; then he was humiliated into a state of excruciating alertness and thought he might as bloody well get up to answer the door.

Upon seeing that it was Hal in the corridor Harry immediately attempted to close the door again. Alas the split-second of pleasure Harry had taken in seeing Hal’s black eye had given Hal enough time to squeeze halfway through the door. 

‘Let me in,’ said Hal, brandishing a green bottle, ‘I brought some mediocre Chablis.’ 

‘Stick it up your arse and break it,’ said Harry.

‘You’re wearing pants and socks at four in the afternoon.’ 

‘Yeah, I was on the lash last night, not that you’d know anything about that.’ 

Hal made a move to squeeze the rest of the way through; Harry, frightened half to death, shoved him back, a gesture which he suspected Hal allowed rather than fell victim to. Though he wavered backwards into the corridor, Hal kept a steady hand on the bottle.

‘I’ve got a blunt in my pocket, too,’ said Hal. ‘It’s actually Jack’s, but he needs to go off the stuff anyway, he’s stupid enough as it is.’

‘Wo-wow, I thought that was your tiny erection,’ said Harry.

‘Was that what you said when—’

Harry shut the door, locked it and bolted it, then for good measure texted Hal, ‘Literally get away from my flat or I will call the police and tell them you are an ISIS sleeper agent’. He listened at the door to hear the ping of Hal’s phone and did not hear it.

It was true what he’d said, that Hal wouldn’t know anything about what he did last night. He had been with Max for maybe an hour and a half, with Hal for thirty minutes; on the pavement in front of Bananas, staring up at the masses of legs in the queue, he decided that if he didn’t make a night of it Hal would have robbed him of a piece of his youth, which was already rapidly disappearing. He and Catrin, who was the only one who minded enough to follow him out and see if he’d broken anything, took an Uber to a fifties-themed club in a former public toilet near Hampstead Heath, where they got shattered on craft gin cocktails and tried to recreate the dance from Pulp Fiction. At some point between his fifth and seventh drink Harry decided he was going to pull, and until closing time wandered from wall to wall of the coffin-sized room and shouted conversation at anyone who was passably attractive; when, at 4 am, he found the club emptying, he decided Ed Mortimer had been onto something when he’d said nobody wanted to fuck toffs anymore. It was honestly unfair; Harry had spent all that time on other continents developing a personality just to come back to London, where there weren’t any actual human beings to use it on. By 5 am he was standing on the pavement eating a kebab, between bites asking Siri why we want to shag the people we hate, whether you can contract a venereal disease by touching balls even if you’re wearing a condom, and when the first overground train arrives at Gospel Oak. He also told Siri to make a note saying, ‘Remember to blame Hal for doing this to me,’ only Siri misunderstood and wrote ‘how’ instead of ‘Hal’. It _was_ Hal, he thought, it was Hal: before all this he hadn’t smoked for a year and a half, he’d been a decent person. 

 

* * *

 

‘You should tell the Scots we’ve all changed our minds, we wa-want to get out of the EU after all,’ said Harry through a mouthful of bavette and poached duck egg. Chewing, he swabbed bearnaise sauce from his chin. 

The restaurant was full and high-ceilinged; the clatter of utensils on plates, the particular pitch of a room of Londoners all talking at once, was as bracing as the dark Italian coffee. It felt, Harry thought, like being a child; here he was again, a grown man nominally, having another filial brunch in Bloomsbury before his father caught a train at St Pancras. He remembered scarfing down fry-ups to avoid letting on he was in trouble at school; he’d thought then that there would be fewer secrets at twenty-three than there were at thirteen. 

With the consolatory air of someone who felt he would be better off avoiding a row in a restaurant, Harry’s father said, ‘Well, we haven’t changed our minds.’ He took a sip of his latte, then looked surprised; Harry supposed he had forgotten that, after having been chided by his doctor about his blood pressure, he had committed to swapping all pre-dinner pints for coffee. ‘I’m sure the SNP would be glad to hear we had; but we won’t give the Scots the chance to be smug until we absolutely must, and—touch wood—there won’t be anything we _must_ do.’

‘It’s just that I don’t see why we’ve got to be Lord Lancaster’s ambassador to Scotland,’ said Harry. ‘I mean he can go up to Edinburgh himself, he isn’t doing anything else.’

‘We would be talking to all of them either way,’ said Harry’s father. ‘We might as well take a seat at the round table.’

‘Can’t you just give up London and live at the lodge year-round? Wouldn’t you like that better?’

‘I’m not as old as all that. What is it, have you and Hal been bitching at each other again?’ 

Harry’s mouth must have opened; a drooly line of egg yolk dropped from his mouth to his shirt. He swore a healthy oath and began rubbing at the stain with his napkin. 

‘I haven’t,’ he said, rubbing more fiercely, ‘been doing anything with Hal; we don’t even talk. Which is why—God damn it, I’ve got a thing this afternoon and I don’t have time to go home and change—which is why it drives me mad that I’ve got to like, go to his birthday party and pretend not to want to stick my fingers up his nose and throw him like a bowling ball.’ 

‘It’s diplomacy, Harry, you’ll learn it eventually.’

‘It’s lying down and taking it.’

‘Diplomacy often is,’ said Harry’s father.

While his father paid the bill, Harry went to the toilet so he could sit and scroll through his phone for a couple of minutes in peace. Ed and Catrin were eating gelato, Prince Max was on a yacht in a fjord, Margaret was carrying one of her friends on her shoulders…. Harry liked Margaret’s picture and wrote a rude message to Ed. He refreshed to see that Hal had posted a status saying he was renting a flat in Le Marais starting on the first of next month and did anyone wanted to come stay with him for a few days once he was settled in. With a thump to the wall of the stall Harry said, ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ and was answered by an incredulous cough from somewhere in the direction of the urinals. 

 

* * *

 

If Harry had had to knock on the door and wait on the step for Lord Lancaster’s housekeeper to let him in, he would have turned back. He generally insisted on seeing things through, but was willing to make an exception where Hal was concerned; anyway continuing to blank Hal would have been seeing things through in its own way. But as he ascended the steps of the townhouse the black door swung heavily open and John emerged, headphones over his ears and a gym bag slung over his shoulder. 

Slinging the headphones down around his neck, John said, ‘Oh, hi, Percy. Sorry, didn’t know you’d be by; I was just off to meet someone for tennis.’ Behind his calculating self-effacement there was perplexity, even bluster. He was possessive of his brothers, and he had been surprised. He appraised Harry with a careful eye, though whether or not he came to the conclusion that Harry and Hal were fucking, Harry couldn’t tell. Harry liked to think John was sane enough to avoid thinking about Hal fucking; then one of them would be. 

‘It’s all right, I just came to chat with Hal about something, not anything important, just on a whim,’ said Harry. ‘Is he, um—is he _here_ , by any chance?’

‘Yeah, in his room, unless he’s snuck out through the garden, and I don’t see why he would’ve done since Dad’s gone, too. Go up if you like, Hal won’t mind.’

During the day the house was sepulchral; half the children had grown and gone, the rest of the children were boarders, and while the stillness of the entertaining floor could be excused by the fact that there was no one to be entertained, the upper floors were quiet in a way that suggested habitual emptiness. Ascending, Harry felt pressed inwards, as if he were letting the air out of his lungs and lowering himself to the bottom of a swimming pool. From behind a closed door he heard music: Hal was listening to a cello concerto, a sort of courtly-sounding classical composition which Harry might have scoffed at if he wasn’t astounded at how typical it was that Hal was listening to it. Of course this wasn’t Hal’s taste but his father’s: that was what it meant that he was listening to it here, in his father’s house.

When Harry opened the door Hal jerked his head up and over the lively burbling of an accompaniment-heavy passage cried, ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ After he had pulled the needle from the record he said, more quietly, ‘Jesus Christ, Percy.’ 

‘John let me in,’ said Harry. 

‘Just because John wants me to get murdered,’ said Harry, recovering his dourness, his aura of psychic distance now, ‘doesn’t mean you can’t knock.’ 

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t tell you I was coming, you didn’t tell me you were moving to Paris.’

‘Oh, that’s what this is about. I should’ve known. Look, I’ve got gay friends, I can give you their numbers— Anyway I’m not moving to Paris forever; I hate Paris; I just don’t want to live in the same country as my father anymore, and I don’t think he’s ever going to make that pilgrimage, so.’ 

‘But your father wa-wants you to go to France,’ said Harry; he was surprised at the note of plaintiveness he struck. ‘He was talking about it at your birthday party, he told me if you we-weren’t going to go to Paris I should take you to Prague with me. He must be pleased you are going.’ 

‘A little bit,’ said Hal guardedly. ‘He’d have liked it better if I was going to work there, but I told him this was my belated Grand Tour. In the winter I’ll go to Ibiza or something.’

‘Well I don’t wa-want to fuck your gay friends,’ said Harry. 

‘You haven’t got to. I just thought, you know. Since I won’t be coming round your flat to give you a blowjob every few days.’

‘—I want to fuck you,’ began Harry, stopping then abruptly with the force of having yielded such a vast amount of honor in so few words. He felt like he’d been fragged. ‘I mean, no, I don’t— Yes, I do wa-want to fuck you, but it’s not like I want to fuck _just you_ ; I mean I’d fuck Ed Mortimer’s sister, Ed Mortimer’s girlfriend, Ed Mortimer…. There are plenty of people I would; it’s not like I couldn’t find anyone if you left. It’s just that I want to fuck you _also_. In addition to. Or, given that I’m not fucking anybody else at the moment, just you, but not like, _just you_ , if you see what I mean.’

‘No,’ said Hal.

‘What I mean is I’m raving mad you’re going to France because you won’t be here and I want you to be here because I want to fuck you. Regularly.’

‘Okay,’ said Hal.

‘Okay what? You’re not going?’

‘No, I am going, still. I was just acknowledging you. Polite thing to do.’

‘Right, I just said all that for no reason then, that’s fine.’

‘Right.’ Motioning towards the half-open door, Hal said, ‘Do you want a drink? I’d offer you a line of coke but you’d start breaking things. Still, if you want— Actually, just let me get you a gin and tonic, and I think we’ve got hors d’oeuvres or something left over in the fridge. Lime or cucumber?’ 

‘Who puts cucumber in their gin and tonic? It’s meant to keep you from getting diseases, not moisturise your esophagus.’ 

‘Go down to the kitchen and take what you like, then,’ said Hal.

Harry did, in all the ways that could have been expected at that point. He made himself a G&T with Lord Lancaster’s Plymouth gin, then chopped a lime into wedges and sucked the juice out of one. After dropping another into his glass he turned to Hal, who was searching through the cupboards for snacks, and shoved him back up against the island; when Hal flung his arms out to his sides to grip the edges of the marble top Harry took his wrists and held him down so that he could kiss him without being touched. He kissed Hal with as little finesse as he deserved. Having satisfied that urge he cupped Hal’s cock through his linen trousers. 

‘You know the housekeeper’s still here somewhere,’ said Hal. 

‘Make noises so she knows you’re getting off, then she won’t come in.’

‘Why don’t you make noises?’ 

‘I can’t just decide to make noises. It has to come naturally, or it feels like I’m acting in a porno. But you like acting.’ 

‘No, I don’t.’

‘You do,’ said Harry, and shoved his knee between Hal’s legs so that his own thigh pressed up against his hand which pressed up against Hal’s cock. ‘Acting, pretending, faking it, having a laugh, whatever it is.’ 

However uncomfortable Hal must have been he withstood it. As Harry rubbed him off Hal did make noise, grunts beneath the breath at first, then a deep, dumb mantra of ‘Huh—huh—huh’ which in a minute was interrupted by the culpable whimper of someone who realises he’s coming as he’s coming. Then his trousers were stained, marking out the head of his cock obscenely.

‘I love how you do that,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t even have to try.’ 

‘Happens with everyone, though. Don’t get a swelled head. —Well, too late….’ 

Harry was used to feeling lust very generally and anger precisely: people did things that were bad, and that made him angry at them, but when he got hard it was because his body was a body and bodies liked to be gotten off. Now it had all reversed. He did not hate Hal, he hated that here was a world which had made Hal; he hated the things Hal was, which were not things one could be without the complaisance of everyone else; and he wanted to have Hal. It was a stroke of luck for Hal that Harry only took him by the back of his head and, kissing him, bit his lip till he made a noise that wasn’t controlled entirely. Harry felt after a few minutes of sloppy kissing that Hal was hard again.

‘If you’re going to get me off twice,’ said Hal, ‘let me get my cock out the second time at least.’ 

‘What, are you wa-waiting for me to tell you to pull your trousers down?’ It occurred to Harry that Hal was. ‘Fine—pull them down.’

Directly Hal’s trousers and pants were around his thighs Harry shoved him round and bent him over the island with such force that he had to clutch for a hold on the marble; his palms skidded and he came awfully close to knocking over the vase of white orchids and the fruit bowl. In a strangely naive gesture he glanced back over his shoulder, as if he didn’t know what was to be expected. But he knew what this was: he wouldn’t have let it happen if he didn’t. For that matter he wouldn’t have said, ‘There are condoms in my bedroom.’

‘Do you care?’ said Harry, turning away to rifle through the cupboards. 

‘Do you? You’re not the one who made his reputation at Oxford by contracting an STD from the don known for having buggered Richard Bordeaux.’

‘Oh, right, I’d forgotten about that.’ Harry decided at last on the least expensive-looking bottle of olive oil; it wasn’t so much that he cared about using Lord Lancaster’s good olive oil for sex as that he didn’t care to afford Hal too much luxury. Returning to Hal, unfastening his own trousers and rubbing himself down with oil, he said, ‘Do you just go around giving people blowjobs to kill time, or something?’ 

‘Usually I have a reason,’ said Hal. He rested his elbows on the countertop, hung his head, and let Harry part his legs for him. All his vibrancy, his furious spirit, seemed to have gone dormant; he was lax and supple, willingly manipulated. When Harry began to fuck him he went up on his tiptoes and pressed his hips back into Harry’s in a gesture that reminded Harry of dressage. 

Harry hated it, that sudden, total giving-way of Hal’s. Whenever they weren’t fucking Hal was jabbing at Harry’s Achilles heel, telling Harry, ‘No, you aren’t, you can’t.’ Yet at the crucial moment Hal was the sort of coward who threw his hands up and said, ‘You win,’ and therein won. Harry felt himself choosing to be cruel again, this time with purpose and a sense of moral integrity. He pulled Hal’s hair—well, Hal leant his head back; he slapped Hal’s arse, and Hal grunted; he shoved his fingers in Hal’s mouth and Hal licked, he did not bite.

Rage made Harry bold: what he had shied away from doing in the passageway the night they first kissed he did now. He curled his hand around the front of Hal’s throat and stroked once, gently, then dug his thumb and forefinger into the soft hollows of flesh on either side of his windpipe, where the blood flowed to the head. Hal made noises that could have signalled gratification or exhibitionism or uncontrollable flinches of physical discomfort or something that was meant as one of these things and in the vocalisation became another. Harry, clutching Hal’s throat and releasing, clutching again, fucking him and fucking him, did not know whether he wanted Hal to be aroused or in unbearable pain. 

‘How’s that,’ said Harry, ‘how’s that, Hal? Are you getting off on this? Am I abasing myself enough?’ Sweat dripped down his forehead.

‘Yes,’ said Hal, ‘yes, I am, yes you are, it’s good, keep going, I— Ugh—’ Harry realised Hal was jerking off, pulling at himself more slowly and deliberately than he was being fucked. ‘Ah, fuck, I’m going to come, choke me.’

Harry forced his fingers into the meat of Hal’s throat till he felt the blood thumping through his carotids. Heaving, Hal rose again onto his toes and went still but for the trembling of strained muscles. He came; Harry, in him, saw white. Even half-blind, Harry remembered to savour this sublimity which in thirty minutes would be forcibly forgotten. 

Thumping onto the flats of his feet, letting his head slump down, Hal said, ‘Okay, I’m done, you can let go now.’

‘Why should you get to say “Let go now,” and have me let go, when you can do what you like to me? You’ve never o-once done anything I’ve told you to.’ 

‘That’s the difference between us,’ said Hal lazily. ‘I think things and then I say them—and you do them, and say things, and do and say and do and say, without ever thinking about it.’ 

The arousal Harry felt at having his hand on Hal’s throat was so colossal that he felt for a moment he’d gone beyond his fury: there was only righteousness, the searing impossible belief that he could do nothing now to abase himself, there was no such thing as shame. So he did not take his hand from Hal’s throat; it did not matter that Hal had expected he would not; he crushed his palm into Hal’s windpipe and, after a last long thrust, pressed himself down bodily against Hal and shuddered into Hal’s shirt, his golden hair. 

Then his sweat began to go cold on his skin (he had stepped back from Hal, leaving him bent over the island), and he began to see that he had been humiliated in some way he did not yet understand. He had left Hal Lancaster to clean a Percy’s come out of his arse, and he felt as if he had just been told someone had died but did not quite have the wherewithal to be anything but blasé. 

Hal, turning so that he could lean back against the counter, said, ‘I get to shower first. But if you like you can use my Blenheim Bouquet.’

 

* * *

 

By the time they had finished showering the sun was setting; the townhouse was filled with that subaqeuous red light particular to an afternoon in early autumn. Shadows and sunlight slunk slowly along the wallpaper, touching as they went the consoles in the corridors, the sofas with the worn damask, the vases and the wilting flowers, the greasy-looking 18th century pictures. In such close air the acrid scent of unwashed fucking seemed to cling to them despite the soap and the citrusy cologne. When they went out into the communal garden for a fag Harry felt like he had in school, after being let out of chapel; the London air felt vital, and he was keenly aware of the evening breeze pulling through his hair, slipping down the neck of his shirt. 

‘Joke’s on you,’ said Harry, sucking down one of Hal’s Marlboros, ‘I’m going to Edinburgh to do postgrad work in the South Asian Studies programme. I’ve known for ages. Applied last year.’

’How long d’you think you’ll last?’ 

‘It’s only three years,’ said Harry. ‘I think I’ll get on well enough.’

‘You can always Snapchat me dirty pictures.’ 

‘I’ll have better things to do.’

Along the garden path a neighbour approached, led by an elegant white Borzoi whose long nose twitched as it sniffed the cooling air. Upon seeing the two strangers the dog glanced sedately up at them, attempted a curious leap and was brought down by the tension of the lead. The neighbour, who was too well-dressed to be anything but a City financier, possibly foreign, clicked his tongue in chastisement and looped the lead once more around his clenched fist. 

Slowing, the neighbour said, ‘Hello, Harry,’ and for a moment Harry thought he was talking to him. But of course Harry was Hal, and Hal nodded, pulling the cigarette from his lips and letting out a wispy plume of smoke.

‘Hullo, warm night rather,’ said Hal. 

‘Yes, it isn’t too cool yet. I thought I might try to get out to the country next weekend, take a little drive in my convertible.’ 

‘It’s supposed to be quite nice in a few days, isn’t it? Well, good evening.’ 

‘Mm, good evening.’ 

It was only when the neighbour began to turn away that he seemed to recognise Harry was there. Awkwardly he turned back halfway, even as the Borzoi pulled him forward, to give Harry a discreet head-to-toe-to-head, after which without a nod or a smile he went on turning away. Soon he and the dog disappeared behind a knotty, stunted oak whose leaves had browned but not yet begun to fall. He had seen nothing; he must have looked at Hal and Harry and seen two clean-skinned, damp-haired boys smoking. 

Indoors again they heard the noises of someone else moving about in the hall: leather soles were clicking on the chequered marble. There was some paper, some shifting fabric, some private muttering. Lord Lancaster, they found, was home, looking through the mail and seeming to find nothing of interest; Harry saw the blue circles beneath his eyes, the red in the whites of his eyes, through his smudged bifocals. 

Harry always found it difficult to rationalise the fact that Lord Lancaster was Hal’s father, and that Hal had had a mother also, even if none of them but Lord Lancaster remembered what she had been like. Now he thought he understood it, if only abstractly. They did not look alike, they did not think alike; all the same Harry knew Lord Lancaster had succeeded in creating a thing that was not himself but that carried himself in it. He supposed Lord Lancaster knew what he and his son had been doing. 

‘Ah, I wasn’t expecting you, Percy,’ said Lord Lancaster, tossing the pile of mail down onto the table it had been sitting on. ‘I thought you would have left London by now. When do you go up to Edinburgh?’

‘Oh, no, not yet…about a month left now,’ said Harry vaguely. ‘Might still do Prague for a few weeks.’

‘Well, come to dinner with us tonight, won’t you, before you begin your potato diet? We had meant to have kaiseki at the place near Berkeley Square, I think you know it.’ 

‘Thanks, sorry, but I can’t possibly, I’m meeting Ed Mortimer at this Thai pop-up in Highbury he’s mad about. Actually I’d better leave soon, he’s the sort who won’t wait if he thinks he’s getting stood up—’

After having crossed the threshold, certain that both feet were on the cracked portico and neither foot was in the hall, Harry lit another fag. Bad form probably, as the door was open and Hal was in the doorway, his hand on the brass lion knocker. The wind blew against Harry’s face, the smoke wafted against Hal and through to the hall, which stood empty now that Lord Lancaster had gone upstairs to dress for dinner. Harry ( _Natch_ , he thought, grimacing) turned back: Hal looked as though he’d something to say. He hadn’t; he was only standing for a moment to take the cool air before returning to his house and his father. Harry thought he saw for a second or two the Hal that the neighbour must have seen, the fair insouciant Lord Derby who smoked his cigarette only halfway before flicking it to the ground and turning, letting the fag-end die out of its own accord.

 

* * *

 


End file.
